


Thigmotropism

by Dreamsofoceans



Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, M/M, Plants, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-27 01:26:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21729166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dreamsofoceans/pseuds/Dreamsofoceans
Summary: Prax rebuilds on Ganymede.
Relationships: Amos Burton/Praxidike Meng
Comments: 29
Kudos: 132
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Thigmotropism

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ladygray99](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladygray99/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide! I always love writing about the Expanse, especially Prax and his relationship with Amos, so thank you for requesting them. Thanks to MC for the beta. 
> 
> _Thigmotropism: the turning or bending of a plant or other organism in response to a touch stimulus._

The first message was short, not even a video, just a few lines of text sent by Amos’ account, arriving in the middle of the Ganymedian night, such as it was. “The beans are falling over,” it said. 

Prax didn’t get it until mid-morning, not because he wasn’t awake - he had been, listening to Mei’s slow intake and exhalation of breath - but because he’d put his hand terminal down on the bedside table, alerts turned off. If there was an emergency, he’d hear the alarms. 

He slept as he always did: fitfully, dreaming of klaxons, in a cot laid out next to Mei’s bed. It wasn’t healthy but neither was sleeping on a destroyed moon that he was tasked with putting right, somehow, as if he could reset it like a failed experiment. 

“The beans are falling over,” the message said. Nothing else. 

Amos was somewhere out in the unblinking black of space, and Prax spent more time now looking up than he had before, past the domes and mirrors, into the lightless beyond. The Roci, floating along on all that nothing. Amos, small inside it. 

“Stake them,” he responded, and attached an instructional video, a Belter one but it had subtitles, clear visuals. In the video, the Belter had long thin hands, and Prax imagined Amos’ square fingers, rimmed with grease, carefully digging polymer stakes into the soil, wrapping the spindly first stems of plants with bits of string or tape. 

“Plants grow toward light,” he added, and then considered if he needed to - it’s obvious, axiomatic, the kind of thing that didn’t need to be said, and Amos comes from a planet with open sky, with water, though he’d said the water in Baltimore was brackish, unpotable, that it smelled like salt and dead fish. 

A few days later, a reply. “Thanks, Doc.” A picture, unmoving, a still image of a neat row of beans tied to a wire matrix, tendrils already beginning to find their grips. A set of lighting panels above them, each pot labeled, fed by a watering needle, a set of tubing snaking through. 

A message embedded in the image, Amos’ voice - no video, and they must be in deep space if he was worried about sending video. “Irrigation needles are gunked up from that unfiltered water,” he said. “Not sure if I should dissolve it or just brush ‘em out.”

Amos sounded tired, or maybe Prax was projecting his own exhaustion. 

He’d slept when they first got back to Ganymede, for hours, days, the kind of bone-deep sleep that seemed to defy anything approaching a circadian rhythm. 

Had woken up, bleary-eyed, disoriented, to the buzz of the alert bracelet he wore around his wrist tracking Mei’s vitals. A sense of panic like when the mirrors fell, pressing on his chest, constricting his throat, and it’d been a false alarm - when he’d rushed, sock-footed and unseeing, through the corridors, her signal his only beacon, he had found her sitting in the living quarters of a friend from school, and he’d squeezed her hard, too hard, and she hadn’t cried or pushed against him or done anything but laugh her little girl laugh as he smelled her hair. 

He’d wiped his face. She had a handkerchief in her bag, necessary, her immune system - even on her medication - no match for the constant sniffles of being around other children. She’d gotten it, a pink and purple thing, traced with little silver threads, a child’s thing, child-sized in her strong little fist, and handed it to him. Told him in an imperious tone he’d heard her use on her dolls and friends to dry his face. 

He’d laughed and clutched her, and accepted the gracious offer of house-shoes to wear back to his living quarters from her friend’s mother, and the name of a therapist to add to the collection of names he’d been ignoring. 

Now, Amos’ tired voice calling to him across all that distance. On impulse, Prax attached a still image of his own, a picture taken through his hand terminal’s night camera, Mei in her pajamas, sprawlingly asleep. She snored in little huffs, and he fell asleep to those, sometimes, regulating his own breathing, two of her shallow breaths to one of his deeper ones. 

And he doesn’t know where Amos is or what they’re fighting - has kept his newsfeed to Ganymede, the life-or-death trivialities of its recovery. Ignorance wasn’t bliss, but it might be plausible deniability if anyone came asking him about the Roci crew. He didn’t know where Amos was, didn’t want to know, only that he was alive and breathing somewhere out in the ocean of space. 

“She misses you,” he wrote, under it, because it was true and felt safer to say than anything else. More instructions - how to clear irrigation needles with a set of pliers and bottlebrush, dull repetitive work of the kind Prax used to loathe but now looked forward to. A day spent focused on it, and not on the crop yields, which were still too low. Not on the water reclamation systems, or the mirror restorations, or any of the projects that stood between him and letting his homeworld starve. 

Just a brush and a set of pliers and the watering needles keeping plants A1e, A3f, B5c, B7q, G12e, G12h, D1a, D3f, E7b, and E8h alive. The hard lesson that came when he’d tried to dissolve the gunk off, only to have kaka needles dissolve with it. Once a thing is made, it is forever, as the expression went, unless it’s junk that inners sold them at 20 times the cost. 

He sent instructions, a video of himself de-gunking a needle, his sleeves up to reveal Mei’s alert bracelet, a tattoo he’d gotten planet-side. He talked through it, camera pointed at his hands, his arms, the conical walls of the needle as he cleaned it with a brush. Sent it and the picture of Mei, imagined each turning from images and video to bits of data, broadcast over invisible waves, out to wherever Amos was. Of the long reach of his message, past the mirrors and Ganymede’s gravity well, past the dust and charged solar winds and endless nothing, the miracle of a floating transmission finding someone in all that darkness. 

He hoped for - he didn’t know. Didn’t want to put words to it. Told himself to save that hope for Ganymede like hope itself was a limited reservoir. The hopes that there would be food this year, and the next, drinkable water. Civilization, such as it was. Tree-lined and brightly lit, no monsters from beyond the edge of space there to sow destruction, the weaponized dead rising against them. The kind of big, unselfish hopes that he should have, not the smaller ones that crept into his brain late at night. The ones that longed for his bunk on the Roci, the unwavering certainty that he’d find either Mei or death in the pursuit. The sense of a small and singular purpose. 

Hoped for nothing more than a response, perhaps an Amos-ian, “Thanks, Doc,” another set of questions about raising beans, about watering systems or medical treatments, just to bug Prax, knowing that he’s not that kind of doctor - about something safe and mundane. 

Nothing came. A few days of nothing and then a week. He got up in the morning, washed his hair in the gel shower, walked Mei to school and waited as the alert bracelet registered her location there, set it to go off if she went more than a few hundred yards in any direction. 

Went to his lab and contemplated his plants. Innoculated the soil for the new seedlings with rhizobia and checked the nodules on the older ones, the little clusters of bacteria living in the root matrix, red as blood and smelling of iron. He shuddered, and considered that maybe that day would be the day he called a therapist, a priest, a bartender. Someone paid to listen to the thoughts rattling in his brain, who could quiet the noise that seemed to come upon him at night, the fear and terror that if he shut his eyes, Mei wouldn’t be there when he woke up. 

Brought up an app on his hand terminal, breathed with it for a while. In, and don’t consider what might happen if … out, and let that thought go … 

They supplemented the greenhouse blowers with carbon dioxide, and he stood, breathing in the oxygen they emit as waste and out the carbon that will turn into plant mass, eventual food. Took off his shoes and dug his socked toes into the mats lining the lab floor. Thought about all the forces, about pressure and gravity, that conspired to keep him on Ganymede. 

Breathed in, breathed out. Tended his plants. 

He picked Mei up from school, and she was happy, chattering away. Her teacher waved him over. 

“Stay here,” he said, kissing her on her hair. She did, planted; it wasn’t like she’d wander. 

Her teacher was a Belter, space-born, tattoos on their face and arms, a perpetually kind expression and an accent thick enough to spread. “Today wasn’t a good day,” they said, and Prax reflexively looked over at where Mei was standing, face unstained by tears, hair neat, shifting her weight between her feet, backpack over one shoulder. 

“She’s fine,” they continued. “Or she will be fine. Look,” and they offer an open palm, an expression of sympathy, of safety. “Today was a struggle. She probably should tell you herself. There was a conflict with another student. Mei didn’t - I think she could benefit from some counseling, possibly some therapy. You’ve both been through a lot.”

“We have,” Prax said, reflexively, because it always seemed to discourage others from unpacking, precisely, what they’d been through. 

“Sometimes, when a student has gone through something, it can become stressful for them in ways that are difficult for them to express. Particularly if an adult in their lives has gone through the same thing.”

It hurt, mostly because it was both something true and something Prax didn’t want to hear. For a moment, he imagined telling the teacher it was a load of kaka, taking Mei’s hand and hustling out, of throwing the teacher a dirty look, of firmly not talking about things with Mei. 

It showed in his expression, because they looked at him with that mixture of kindness and judgment Prax found particularly distasteful from adults - the kind that said they knew better, even if they did. 

“I just want to -” he began, and then considered what he wanted. To keep her whole, unharmed, insulated from the things that haunted the dark corners of his room at night. “Keep her safe.” 

The teacher seemed to absorb this, going to the electric kettle and switching it on. Fussing a set of loose tea leaves into a waiting strainer. Glancing over at Prax, and making a second cup at his affirmative. “Na desh séfetiye napelésh ere kuxaku,” they said, finally. There was no safety anywhere in space. 

“Na desh séfetiye napelésh ere kuxaku,” Prax repeated. He dreamed, during the fitful times that he slept, he dreamed of the mirrors falling again. Crop failures. Reservoirs drying. A contaminant in the recycling system. An asteroid, lobbed at them by terrorists. Unsafe things, the kind that woke him in a cold and drying sweat. 

He considered Mei’s small shoulders, her bag across them. The tiny childhood burdens that should be the only thing she had to carry. 

He accepted the tea and the chilled mug the teacher poured for Mei, the comm info for a therapist specializing in family counseling. They sat and drank together, and Mei told him about her day and he told her about his. 

There was no safety anywhere in space, he thought, but perhaps they could make some, just for a little while. 

A month went by, and Prax commed the therapist, drank tea with his friends, talked with Mei about one good thing and one not-so-good thing that happened during her day. Righted each plant when they tipped over in their containers. Pushed the gunk out of watering needles. Washed his hair. 

The mirrors were fully back up, and there was enough available light to replant some of the trees in the corridors, spindly little things, with root balls that had to be handled carefully, held up by polymer tubes until they could stand on their own. A promise for the future. 

Mei came along, watched intently and labeled each tree’s tube with the identification markers Prax showed her, a grease pencil and her wobbly lettering. They celebrated after, cake with icing so sweet it made his teeth hurt. “It’s their birthday,” Prax said, when Mei asked why they were eating cake, and laughed with when she laughed and dabbed pink frosting on her nose. 

Amos didn’t comm back and Prax - he worried, constantly, but unspecifically. Mei missed him too, asked after him and he sent pictures, sped-up videos of plants growing, Mei’s drawings, the tiny things of their new lives. Eventually, he stopped expecting a return message. 

He also didn’t expect Amos, on his doorstep, holding his side like it pained him. 

“Hey, Doc,” he said, and Prax’s stomach was somewhere up his esophagus and into his mouth, his heart a drum against his ribs. 

“Are you -” Prax said. He stood aside, letting Amos in, and he was walking tenderly - it must be bad, something deep and possibly permanent to have him walk like that, faltering. To collapse on the couch, exhale through his teeth. 

“Are you OK?” he asked, but of course he wasn’t. Prax went, on autopilot, for the med kit - Amos wasn’t bleeding. Or, he mentally revised, visibly bleeding. But it could be anything, and his mind cycled through possibilities: broken ribs, bruising, internal damage, and he wasn’t a doctor, or at least, not that kind of doctor, and his mind given no other possibilities ran toward panic. 

Still, there were things he could do. Pressure dressing if he was bleeding. A hot pack for pain. An analgesic. Panic divided down into a series of actionable steps, and he grabbed the kit, his hand terminal, ready to summon - there weren’t emergency services, not ones that wouldn’t immediately rat Amos out to whatever authority he was probably trying to avoid if he was collapsing in Prax’s living quarters and not in a medbay somewhere. But every planet and moon and rock operated on a gray economy, and Prax had made a point of cycling between caregivers so that if one betrayed them again, he’d still have plenty of bribable sources for Mei’s medication. 

“Hey,” Amos said when he got back to the living room, and he had a pillow stuffed under his back, another resting at his side, but he wasn’t shiny with pain sweat and didn’t seem panicked, though he never really panicked. “Hey,” he said again. “I was uh - we were in the neighborhood.” 

“Are you hurt?” Prax asked. 

“Yeah. I mean, not bad.” Which would mean anything from a bruise to an internal organ rupturing and - “No, for real, Doc. Re-entry was rough. I ain’t getting any younger, you know?”

Which probably meant they entered atmo in a hail of railgun fire. “Here,” he said, and twisted a hotpack, activating it and handing it to Amos. 

He pulled his shirt half-up, and there was a bruise there, a deep blue-black impression over the plates of muscle, the kind of thing that hurt just to look at. Amos took the hotpack, pressed it gratefully to his side, and the dissolving painkiller Prax handed him, and a cup of water, and a clean shirt - something he’d gotten from a coworker who’d had no sense of size - and a blanket. 

Where’s the rest of the crew? he didn’t ask. Why are you here and not in a medbay or on any of the hundred rockhopper stations that would clean you up and send you out for enough anonymous credits? What are you running from? 

The painkiller didn’t affect Amos, at least not immediately, and he looked tired. Tired and worn, and it wasn’t a word he’d associated with Amos before - Amos, who seemed ageless. 

He’d asked, once, how old he was, and Amos had shrugged, like he was rolling the question off his shoulders. “Unregistered means unregistered, Doc,” he said. Prax can’t imagine him caring, can’t imagine him in a birthday hat or blowing at candles on a cake.

“Can I get another one of those?” he asked, and Prax hands over two tablets, enough to fell someone twice his size, both of which Amos set on his tongue, taking a gulp of water to wash them down. They were quick-acting, and Prax told the living quarters’ lights to dim. 

“Where’s Mei?” Amos asked and his voice was already softening at the edges. 

“A friend’s.” Prax held up his alert band, its steady blue blink indicating Mei’s normal vital signs, that her matching wristband was active and unthreatened. That she was unharmed, whole, safe. “We can comm her, if you’d like.”

“No,” Amos said. “No comms.”

He’d truly gone to ground then, and for a minute, a hot roll of anger goes over Prax - how could he bring this kind of -

“They ain’t looking for me, Doc. Just … Holden said to stay low, stay silent. You know how it is.” He closed his eyes, wincing, and there were lines there, radiating around them. “You got a new tattoo.” 

Prax glanced down at his arm, at the tattoo inked there. His most visible one. He was a Belter, even if they’d call him a wellwala for his accent, his degree. “Yeah,” he said, offering it for Amos’ inspection. 

Amos’ hands were how they’ve always been - callused at the edges around his nails, the pads of his fingers soft - careful on Prax’s skin like Prax was someone he should be careful with, like the delicate wires of a machine, the reaching tendril of a bean plant. He traced the tattoo, the length of it, beginning at Prax’s wrist and up to the cuffed sleeve of his shirt. 

The artist had asked Prax if he was certain about it, certain that he’d wanted something that resembled a scar down his forearm, staples bridging it, a tattoo of a wound, something ugly and not yet healed. 

“You can’t see the one on your head,” Amos said, nodding at where Prax’s hair was longer now, hair having grown over the puckered scar on the side of his skull. He’d thought it wouldn’t - thought he’d look at every mirror and video of himself and see that scar, the place where Amos had stapled him back together, but it’d grown in, over it, and some days he surprised himself, washing his hair, that he could still feel it. 

“Yeah,” Prax said. “I wanted - I guess I wanted to make sure I remembered.”

Amos didn’t ask what he’d wanted to remember, just stared with those eyes of his, the unblinking blue of them, and he was going hazy at the edges. “Frankenstein,” he said, and his voice sounded thick, like his tongue was a little too big for his mouth, and then corrected. “No, the monster. I remember. I stitched you up.” 

“Everyone who sees it,” Prax said. “They see the scar.” It was noticeable - he’d gotten it to be noticeable.

“Not just the scar.” Amos ran a fingertip over the tattoo, over the image of a staple holding the two sides together. 

“The beans kept tipping over,” Amos said, like that made any kind of sense.

“You staked them. You sent me a picture.”

“Yeah, Doc, just had to give ‘em something steady to grab onto. Sometimes that’s the way it is.” 

And his eyes were sliding shut, face mild and unthreatening, and unthreatened, on Prax’s couch, under Prax’s blanket. Amos’ hand slack against his arm, as Prax threaded his fingers between Amos’, watched him breathe. Held on.

Mei would be home soon, would wake Amos carefully by shaking his ankle and then climb onto him when he was half-awake. Would ask him where he’d been, where the crew was going. Would tell him that she missed him, and that she’d worried about him being out there, worried that he might not return, all said with the uncomplicated bravery of children. 

“Yeah,” Prax said. “Sometimes that’s the way it is.”


End file.
